last night, and all the stars are there

Just as it was getting a little too cold for another weekend in the summer cottage, I went back there one more time. 

My addiction made me go. Addiction to the silence of the old fir trees, silvery and dripping with cold rain, and to the hooting of swans gathered in the darkening bay.

The grass and the alder trees were going grey, looking weary and old. Birches were turning a cold lemon colour. The sea had the unforgiving shade of chilly steel, making me shiver just to look at it.

I did a bit of work, huddled up under a scratchy blanket with my laptop and feeding firewood into the stove. I pulled on a thick hoodie and cleared away the remnants of the bonfire we had on the beach the weekend before, the end-of-summer weekend. I read a novel, solved a few crosswords, wrote a little fiction, and slept the sleep of the blessed as the night chill crept back into the cottage.

That intense solitude, far from other people, never really feels like loneliness. But there is an aching melancholia in the autumn stillness when birds leave and everything goes to sleep for a long, frozen winter, when all life withdraws into a tiny core that is hard to see or hear. So I was delighted when my sister showed up on the second day.

That night was one of the highlights of the year, better even than the balmy summer evenings we have spent together in the same environment. Perhaps because of the September darkness, which descends so unforgivingly with absolute blackness and turns the cottage into a tiny beacon of light and warmth at the edge of a vast and unknown space.

We pooled our resources of chocolate, crisps, nuts and melon slices, uncorked a large bottle of sparkling lemon water. Then we squeezed into a narrow single bed to watch National Treasure, a favourite movie, on the laptop. Outside, the night was a black abyss but the fire spread a comforting warmth and the dog snored at our feet.

Before retiring to our own beds, we went down to the beach at midnight. We turned off the flashlight and let our bodies adjust to the icy darkness.

All the stars in the universe frolicked around us. The bay had gone still and invisible, ringed by forests. The atonal hooting of the many swans nearby turned into a concert of flutes and oboes and bassoons, its echoes travelling five miles to the opposite shore and returning unhindered, waves upon waves. A goose or two inserted a raspy contribution. Something that went unseen and unheard by us suddenly scared all these large birds and hundreds of them took flight at once. We could see nothing in the darkness and just gasped at the eerie sound of heavy feathers beating the air, as if the timpanist of this odd orchestra had suddenly got into his thunderous solo.

We retired to warm beds and happy dreams. When welcoming the autumn, it's best to do it with a sister.